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Neoteny, Dialogic Education And An Emergent Psychoculture: Notes On Theory And Practice, David Kennedy

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

This article argues that children represent one vanguard of an emergent shift in Western subjectivity, and that adult-child dialogue, especially in the context of schooling, is a key locus for the epistemological change that implies. Following Herbert Marcuse's invocation of a 'new sensibility', the author argues that the evolutionary phenomenon of neoteny-the long formative period of human childhood and the pedomorphic character of humans across the life cycle-makes of the adult-collective of school a primary site for the reconstruction of belief. After exploring child-adult dialogue more broadly as a form of dialectical interaction between what Dewey called 'impulse' and 'habit', …